“When the trumpets sounded, the people shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the people gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so every man charged straight in, and they took the city” (Joshua 6:20).
Could an earthquake have destroyed ancient Jericho at precisely the exact moment when Joshua and the warriors of ancient Israel marched around the walls seven times and blew their trumpets? Amos Nur thinks so. He’s a Stanford University geophysicist who has been studying the 10,000 year-long historical record of earthquakes in the Jordan Valley. He says that Jericho “sits practically on the Jordan Fault that divides the Arab plate from the Sinai plate.”
A recent edition of National Geographic magazine quotes the scientist who notes that the walls of Jericho collapsed in a single direction, as they would in an earthquake, not in a variety of directions as they would if they had been destroyed by an invading army.
There is one thing, however, which the scientist overlooks. The record doesn’t even suggest that Joshua’s army destroyed the walls. Here’s the text: “When the trumpets sounded, the people shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the people gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so every man charged straight in, and they took the city” (Joshua 6:20). Even a casual reading makes it clear that it was God, not the army, or psychological warfare that destroyed ancient Jericho. Could God have used an earthquake? There is nothing that would eliminate that possibility.
Actually, Amos Nur, the scientist whom I quoted, wasn’t the first to suggest than an earthquake may have been physical cause of the wall’s collapse. Dr. John Garstang, director of the British school of Archaeology in Jerusalem, excavated Jericho between 1929 and 1936. Garstang found that the walls did actually “fall down flat” (using his terminology). He also noted that the walls fell outward and dragged the inner walls and houses with it, as would take place in an earthquake. Garstang demonstrated quite conclusively that fire destroyed the existing grain supplies, evidence that chaos resulted from this cataclysmic disturbance.
The Jordan Valley is like a giant split in a sandwich. It separates the Arabian Desert (which we know as Jordan, Iran and Iraq today) from the gentle hills adjacent to the Mediterranean. Starting from Galilee, with an altitude of 700 feet below sea level, the Jordan drops to 1300 feet below sea level at the Dead Sea. A giant seismic fault runs deep through that valley.
The theory that God may have used an earthquake seems to be rational, yet it doesn’t, for a moment, remove God from the landscape of human history. We then are faced with a miracle of timing that defies human explanation. Even today, nobody knows when an earthquake is going to take place. We only know when it does take place. Of that, there is no question.
Apart from a supernatural revelation of God, anyone who positions himself around the walls of a city and blows his trumpet expecting an earthquake would be considered deranged and a candidate for an institution.
God normally uses the natural laws, which He put into operation in a supernatural manner, to do His bidding. Science often focuses on an attempt to explain the “how” of something, and often misses the “what” of the entire event.
The spade of the archaeologist has confirmed the record that Joshua penned long ago with uncanny accuracy—something that makes me acknowledge all of this could never have just happened.
Interested in knowing more about the hand of God in history? Then go to your Bible. You’ll discover that the Bible tells you what happened, and, perhaps eventually, the archaeologist may confirm that it did happen! The records stand for themselves.
Resource reading: Joshua 6.
